The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced on the 20th that the library at the New York Korea Center, newly built and opened on June 27 last year, won the grand prize in the public interior category of the interior design division at Germany's '2025 iF Design Award.'
The iF Design Award is one of the world's most prestigious design awards, considered among the top three global design awards alongside Germany's 'Red Dot Design Award' and the United States' 'IDEA.' It is organized by 'iF International Forum Design,' a German design institution recognized worldwide for its long history and credibility.
This year's competition received over 11,000 entries from 66 countries, and the winners were selected through the evaluation of 131 international design experts. The award ceremony will be held on April 28 at the Friedrichstadt Palast theater in Berlin, Germany, and the winning works will be registered and published in the 'iF Design Award' yearbook.
The library located on the third floor of the New York Korea Center was designed to convey the unique beauty of Korean design to New York, the center of world culture, by modeling each bookshelf on the framework structure and dancheong (traditional multicolored paintwork) motifs of hanok (traditional Korean houses). Choi Chang-hak, director of Studio Empathy, and Kim Ji-young, director of Praxes, who were responsible for the library design, stated, "Focusing on the communication function of modern libraries, we reinterpreted the spatial beauty and functional and structural efficiency of traditional architecture’s naturalism and hanok motifs to complete a borderless library and apply it to contemporary library design."
The Korea Center houses institutions promoting Korean culture, including the Korean Cultural Center, Korea Tourism Organization, Korea Creative Content Agency, and Sejong Institute, providing comprehensive services that organically connect various elements of Korean culture through cooperation among these organizations. The New York Korea Center is the sixth to be established, following Los Angeles (LA), Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Paris.
Kim Hyun-jun, Acting Director of the International Cultural Promotion Policy Office at the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, who oversees the establishment of Korea Centers worldwide, stated, "We expect that the New York Korea Center will contribute to elevating Korea’s cultural status by not only relocating with related public institutions such as the Korea Tourism Organization to a larger space but also by equipping professional performance halls, exhibition spaces, and a library, and furthermore delivering the beauty of Korean design to New York."
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